There are many circumstances in which people have to inspect the content of large e-mail folders. These folders may be personal inboxes in which large amounts of mail have accumulated, personal folders to which many messages have been routed, or archives of public or private discussion lists. For personal folders, a user may intend to sort messages into those to be discarded and those to be subjected to deeper examination or action. For mailing list archives, a user's purpose may be to understand the general concerns of the archive and to focus on those concerns, if any, that are relevant to the user. Such tasks are in contrast to focused searches for particular kinds of information.
Folder examinations are facilitated to some extent by contemporary mailers by providing high-level outline listings, with progressive disclosure that allows expansion of categories or subject items to listings of individual messages within a selected group. Further, these contemporary mailers may include a presentation that can descend to the message-list level where the first few lines of the individual messages may sometimes be included in the listings. However, such lines may be of limited utility because they often consist of a greeting followed by a quoted excerpt from a previous message. Thus, such mailers may repetitively display excerpts from the same message.